It could be that your charger is set up to more or less dump 6 amps thru a battery, which has a level of resistance to having electricity pushed into it; the charger could be actually able to dump 8-10 amps under a no-load situation, creating the fault condition. Perhaps a better quality charger would be in order to sustain that amperage.

I know this is an ancient thread, but the subject is right for me, so…..I have a few planes that I’m getting around to restoring and decided to try the electrolysis method to remove rust. Read several threads and blogs, bought a charger 2/6A, got everything set up, careful about polarity, made sure I had good connections and…...nothing. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong and reversed the polarity just to see what would happen and it starts working, i.e. bubbling away like crazy. That’s fine except I don’t want the plane iron to be ruined so I can remove the rust from the rebar I’m using as an anode!

It seems that the charger has a function that detects the polarity to prevent you from making a mistake when charging a battery. I’ve looked around and it would appear that every charger I can find has this function. Any ideas on how I can get around this? I read that this isn’t brain surgery but…....

Go to garage sales and find an old charger. Mine has no brain, just a 6/12 selector switch. Until then, if you go to salvation army or goodwillyou can pick up a small DC charger – the little black box with a cord thing that used to be on every computer printer/radio/dual-voltage razor etc. Chop off the little connector that used to go into the computer printer/radio/dual-voltage razor etc and then make a small slice and peel the two wires apart. The coloring scheme there is never the same so you’ll have to then plug it into some sacraficial pieces of metal to figure out which is the real black/red. I used to buy those little things 3 for $1 at the thrift store and I’d still be using them if I hadn’t found a cheap car-battery charger.

Sometimes, using an old battery (a small one out of a motorcycle works fine) as a “load” will excite the charger enough to cause it to run. U use just such a setup, and I simply place the battery in the tank to make sure that if any fluid boils out of the battery, it simply dumps into the spooge tank. As others have already said … an older charger is more likely to work, as it doesn’t have the “smart-charger” technology. Pawn shops and yard sales are your friends.

-- - dabbling in sarcasm is foolish … if you’re not proficient at it, you end up looking stupid … ... ...

seeing that this has been brought back to life I thought I’d throw this into the mix – some chargers (newer ones) have a controller that checks the charge level of the battery to prevent over-charging. this is actually a ‘feature’ which is great for batteries – and horrible for everything else – like electrolysis. the problem is that when the charger isn’t able to detect the battery charge level (since there is no battery in electrolysis) it would yield “fault”.

if you can bypass “smart” charging features, or can find a charger with no such feature you are better off for electrolysis purposes. those smart functions are no good for these purposes.